Wee Willie Winkie

We all know "Wee Willie Winkie", don't we? Whether recited in its original 1841 broad lowland Scots or as quickly rephrased in English, generations of mothers have lulled their restless babes to sleep with its rollicking lines. Remember? "The cat is singing purring sounds to the sleeping hen,/ The dog's spread out on the floor, and doesn't give a cheep, /But here's a wakeful little boy who will not fall asleep!" *** But "Wee Willie Winkie" is also a short story dashed off by 22 year-old Rudyard Kipling in 1888 in his last of seven years of newspapering in British India. He had been born in Bombay in December 1865. It begins "His full name was Percival William Williams, but he picked up the other name in a nursery-book, and that was the end of that." Six-year old "Willie-Baba" as he is called by his mother's Indian ayah, is son of the Colonel of the 195th Infantry regiment. One day his favorite subaltern's fiancee rides across the border of British India into the land of the Afghans. Willie rides after on his pony. She is thrown and both are about to be held for ransom by what Willie calls Bad Men or Goblins. But the men of the 195th ride up and Wee Willie is a hero. *** This story also lends its title to a book: one of 14 longish short stories dashed off by Kipling in 1888 or earlier in between stints for pure journalism for two Anglo-Indian newspapers. Advertising in 1888 said this about the content of WEE WILLIE WINKIE AND OTHER CHILD STORIES: "illustrations of the four main features of Anglo-Indian life, viz., the Military, Domestic, Native and Social." *** Not all of the 14 stories are about children. And certainly some are distinctly NOT for children, being about light-hearted or bored adulteries of 7,000 foot high hill station Simla, summer capital of the British Raj. Tales readers might already know include "The Phantom Rickshaw," "Baa Baa, Black Sheep," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft" and "The Man who would be King." The last was made into a 1975 feature film directed by John Huston and starring Sean Connery as ill-fated free-booting Freemasons Daniel Dravot and Michael Caine as Peachy Carnehan. "Baa Baa Black Sheep" is a depressing tale of child abuse, as Kipling and sister Trix (Alice) lived it from age 5 to 12 in a seaside English boarding house where he had been left by his parents when they left the youngsters there and returned to Bombay and then moved on to Lahore in India. *** WEE WILLIE WINKIE AND OTHER CHILD STORIES abounds in tales worth reading even if you have no knowledge of Kipling's life. But they are also part of the Kipling biography and especially its annus mirabilis 1888 when Kipling published some of his earliest works of genius. -OOO-